Card Games: BANG! the Bullet

Oh, how I love the card game, BANG! It’s just about one of the best games I have ever played. No matter who we teach it to, they always end up wanting to play again.

In this game you are randomly given a role which determines what your goal of the game is. There is a Sheriff, Outlaw, Deputy, and Renegade. The number of players determines how many Outlaws, Deputies and Renegades you have. The Sheriff’s role is to kill the Outlaw and the Renegade, the Outlaw’s role is to kill the Sheriff, the Deputy’s role is to keep the Sheriff alive and the Renegade is to be the last man alive. When playing with my regular gaming friends, I find that the easiest role is usually the Sheriff and the most difficult role is the Renegade. You may think that since the Sheriff is hard since they have the most enemies, but you must remember that the Outlaws usually do not want to give their identities away since the Sheriff has so many potential allies in the Deputy and Renegade.

Aside from your Role, you are assigned a special ability character. These are characters that are named after famous Wild West characters, Willy the Kid or Bart Cassidy. The special abilities can be great (Use any card as a Missed) or it can be weak (When a player dies draw 2 cards), but what sets them apart is the amount of lives you get. Most of the strong characters will have less lives than the weak characters. That definitely balances out the game.

While you play, you are able to draw cards to enhance your abilities or to perform an action. The game consists of a distance concept. Depending on how far you are sitting from someone determines how far away they are from you. So, in a game of 8 players, the person furthest from you is 4 distance away. In order to manipulate the distance you are from someone, you will need to close that distance by having a distance related character ability, using a gun or object that changes your distance, or kill the people next to you to bring you closer. The actions that you can perform are attacking, defending, gaining life, forcing other players to discard cards, drawing extra cards and a bunch of other crazy things. As you can tell, much of this game is the luck of the draw. That doesn’t mean that this game doesn’t require skill. Many times you will find that you need to fake people out, or get sympathy for having the weakest character.